The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Most contemporary application programs that include the ability to print data use a printer driver to print data. A printer driver is a process that acts as a translator between a printing device and application programs that use the printing device. More specifically, a printer driver receives print data from an application program and formats the print data as required by the target printing device. One of the benefits of using printer drivers is that support for new features or functionality of a printing device can be provided by installing a new version of a printer driver without having to update application programs. Similarly, support for a new printing device can be provided by installing a new printer driver.
Printer drivers typically include a graphical user interface (GUI) to allow users to specify various printer driver settings. As used herein, the term “printer driver setting” refers to a value of a printer driver attribute. Examples of printer driver settings include, without limitation, input tray, paper size, page range (e.g., all, current or specific pages), layout orientation, pages per sheet, scaling, what to print (e.g., document, comments, styles, etc.) and print quality. Printer driver settings may also add data to an electronic document. For example, printer driver settings may specify that a watermark or confidential notice is to be printed on an electronic document. As another example, printer driver settings may specify that additional pages be printed with an electronic document, such as a license or notice page.
One of the issues with conventional printing drivers is that the printer driver settings are not persistent and must be manually specified each time an application program is executed. For example, suppose that a user wants to specify particular printer driver settings to be used to print a particular word processing document. The user conventionally selects an icon in the word processing program that is associated with printer driver settings. This causes the printer driver to display the GUI for specifying printer driver settings. The user selects the printer driver settings to be used to process the particular word processing document. For example, the user may specify a particular input tray, paper type, a page range, scaling and print quality to be used to process the particular word processing document. The particular word processing document is processed using the printer driver settings specified by the user. When the user wants to print the particular word processing document a second time, the user must again specify the printer driver settings, if the application program has been restarted. Similarly, when another user wants to print the same particular word processing document, for example on another computer, the other user must also manually specify the printer driver settings to be used to process the particular word processing document. This is very inefficient in situations where multiple users are working on and printing the same word processing documents.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need for an approach for managing printer driver settings that does not suffer from limitations of prior approaches for printing electronic documents. There is a particular need for an approach for managing printer driver settings that is more user friendly than conventional approaches for printing electronic documents.